Race Ready

Tune up for your next big event with a shorter one--and you may even PR twice.

Three weeks before Deena Kastor became the first U.S. woman to crash the 2:20 barrier, at the 2006 London Marathon, she ran an American record (1:07:34) at the Berlin Half-Marathon. Three weeks before winning the Chicago Marathon last October, she won the Philadelphia half.

Notice a pattern? Kastor used the half-marathons three weeks out from her main events as a "tune-up"–a shorter distance to prepare mentally and physically for the marathon. Tune-up races are as important to Kastor and other elite runners as dress rehearsals are to professional stage actors. "With all the time I spend on monotonous training," says Kastor, "I tend to lose some of my competitiveness. Tune-up races give me that fire back. Plus, they let me practice the eating, drinking, and thinking before a race." The shorter races let you sharpen your pacing, fine-tune your fueling, and rehearse the mental strategies you need to propel you to success. And they prepare your body for the hard effort. "Tune-up races push your aerobic system and teach your muscles to clear out lactic acid," says Zika Palmer, an exercise physiologist and a 2:41 marathoner.

Tune-ups are often half the distance of the target race, a 5-K before a 10-K for example. The shorter races require less recovery, so you can resume training and still be well rested for the big day. You can go even shorter closer to your event; a 5-K can be an effective tune-up one week before a 26.2-mile effort. And with all the hard training you've been doing, you just might nail the shorter distance, like Kastor, and come away with a personal record–or two.

The Start of Something Big

Tune-up races run at half the distance of the target race typically mark the end of heavy training and the beginning of the taper for your target race–usually two to five weeks out. Shorter tune-ups can be done midtaper. The exact time depends on the distance of your main event (see "Tune-Up Timeline," below), but the race calendar will likely be the deciding factor. If you have a choice, keep your personal recovery needs in mind; you want to be fully rested for your target race. Runners older than 50 or new to racing should schedule an earlier event. If you can, choose a course–hilly, flat, rolling–that's similar to your target race.

Elite runners traditionally race tune-ups at top speed. "The main advantage to this approach," says Steve Sisson, head coach for Rogue Training Systems, a leading endurance-training company in Austin, Texas, "is that by hitting a faster pace than you plan to run in your target race, your main event will seem easy." It gets your body used to running all-out, to digging deep into its reserves, as you'll undoubtedly do in your target race.

Another strategy is to run the tune-up at the same pace you plan to run your main event. "The value of this approach is that you teach your body to really know that target race pace," says Palmer. "This can be done in training, but a race environment more closely simulates your target race." The slower pace is also easier on the body, so you recover faster. New runners or racers, people prone to injury, or runners concerned that an all-out tune-up might blow their chance of a PR a few weeks hence should consider the target-race-pace approach. It's also a smart choice if the race calendar forces you to run a tune-up closer to your main event than you'd prefer.

If you choose the target-race-pace method, Palmer suggests running the first two-thirds at goal pace, then picking up your speed for the last third. For example, if you were running a 10-K to tune up for a half-marathon, you'd run the first four miles of the 10-K at your half-marathon-target pace, then go all-out for the final 2.2 miles. "Speeding up at the end is good preparation for finishing strong in your target race," she says. If you're not feeling good, just maintain the slower pace–and don't sweat it. A tune-up race doesn't have to go well to serve a vital role. "Regardless of how fast you run it," says Palmer, "it gets your mind and body into racing mode."